Prejudice And Oppression In Michael Bay's The Island

Prejudice, dehumanization, oppression. This basic formula has served as the basis of tyranny throughout many of mankind’s greatest tragedies. In Michael Bay’s The Island, Dr. Merrick is in the business of creating human beings to serve as insurance policies. The main characters, Jordan Two Delta and Lincoln Six Echo, are scientifically manufactured as the clones of two prominent celebrities. Throughout the film, the two struggle to escape the cruel hold of Dr. Merrick as he desperately attempts to retain his valuable products and personal reputation. The systematic oppression and dehumanization of the clones employed by Merrick follows a mold similar to tactics used by slaveholders and the Germany’s Nazis. In Michael Bay’s dystopian work, the process used to oppress the clones draws

Anti-Semitic prejudices against Jews included that Jews were cheap and attempting to undermine Germany. Likewise, slaveholders believed that Africans were a dirty and mentally inferior race. Using these prejudices as justification, both slaves and Jews were subsequently dehumanized. In the Third Reich, Jews were rounded up into poor communities to serve, forced to carry identification at all times, and referred to as terms such as untermenschen, meaning under-person. Similarly, Africans were called derogatory terms and even branded by their masters as a powerful symbol that they were simply property. Ultimately, these processes of treating people as less than human led to tragedies that devastated the lives of millions of people. Dr. Merrick follows the same format in his oppression of the clones. Merrick’s prejudice originates from the idea that the clones are nonhuman because of the scientific nature of their birth, though they clearly feel genuine emotions. Additionally, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta are tattooed with identification and forced to live in a